Building the Audio Note Kit 1 SET amp...

Eagle eye Al! 👏👏👏

You have just convinced me never to try this at home.

GSM, why the comment? If you are not the kind of person who wants to build, learn, test, fiix and understand your gear, then no you would never do this regardless of the outcome. Testing and trouble shooting gear is part of the process of learning and DIY. Cannot separate it. It comes with the turf as they say.

Rebbi I am impressed with your patience and dedication to the understanding and building of your amp. I have had to trouble shoot several of my projects of late and was forced to learn. One was particularly difficult to sort out, but I learned so much. You will conquer this gremlin and along the way learn a great deal about tube amps. Forge on you brave and capable tube amp pioneer!

Grannyring,
Yes, I am certainly learning a lot. It's a good feeling to know that I can take the bottom of the chassis off and fix or upgrade anything I want. Like, on a trivial letter, when I got the amp back from the local "repair" shop (sorry for the sarcasm), the speaker binding posts and input selector switch were both loose. On a factory built amp, I'd have been all upset. On my Kit 1, I just took the chassis bottom cover off and tightened a few lock nuts. What a nice feeling!

Almarg,
You are amazing: bingo and bingo!
What Brian explained to me is that the ceramic caps (C1, 2, 3 and 4) perform some sort of filtering function and aren't in the signal path at all. The reason there are two sets of pads in the PCB is that the PCB (which is an original Audio Note design) can accommodate more than one size/type of cap in that position, and the two sets of holes take two different kinds of caps. As they are right now, they're shorted out and not doing anything, but that doesn't effect the troubleshooting we're doing.